Influencer Marketing: An Effective Way to Promote Your eCommerce Business

With the rising competition, companies have to increase brand awareness and be constantly on the minds of their potential consumers. Social media creators have an already established community and can support your brand's advertising message and deliver it in a clear and engaging way.

If done correctly, influencer marketing can also help companies reach a wider audience and grow sales.

Besides, all eCommerce sectors can benefit from a collaboration with content creators, starting from beauty and skin care products, tech and gadgets, clothes and fashion, pharmacy, and so on.

Based on many years of first-hand experience, HypeFactory compiled a list of the top 5 tips that can help your eCommerce brand launch and run successful campaigns.

Promoting a business in a competitive market might feel overwhelming but it shouldn't be. As with everything else, you just need to make sure that you understand the process before putting it into action.

This process can be broken down into 12 steps:

1. Define the goal and objectives and choose the right KPI to track progress.
   
2. Create forecasts if possible. For example, if you have industry benchmarks or results from your previous experience.
   
3. Do thorough research on your target clients. Take into account not only their demographics but also whom they follow and what social media platforms they use.
   
4. Create an influencer persona based on your customer research to understand better what profiles you will reach out to.
   
5. List those profiles that meet the requirements.
   
6. Shortlist the most suitable ones.
   
7. Develop a plan for your campaign, including a brief.
   
8. Create a legal agreement.
   
9. Start outreach emails.
   
10. Negotiate and sign agreements.
    
11. Manage the campaign, including optimization and reporting.
12. Analyze performance and write down lessons learned.
    

Once you outline what is needed for each of these steps, you can start working on promoting your brand.

Although choosing the right influencers is an important part of every campaign, a simple imitation won't be enough. What works for one eCommerce brand, doesn't necessarily work for another.

By simply trying to analyze the influencer marketing efforts of your competitors, you won't be always able to replicate their success. That's why you should choose collaborations taking into account both your goals and customers' needs.

Experienced brands select content creators based foremost on their target audience. By partnering with influential individuals, companies aim to get access to their followers and fans, increase the number of touchpoints, and connect with potential customers in a meaningful way.

There are at least four dimensions that you can use to see if this is a good match (The 4 C's of Influencer Marketing framework):

• Content: Find out what type of content your customers prefer. For example, understand which social media platform they use, what profiles are popular there, and what is in the trend.
  
  
• Competence: Make sure that selected influencers can deliver the expected results. The quality of their posts should meet your requirements. Ideally, you want them to have experience in brand collaborations too.
  
  
• Community: If the audience quality is low, you won't get high reach or engagement. For example, HypeFactory carefully checks whether the followership consists of real followers or has too many suspicious accounts.
  
  
• Culture fit: Ensure that an influencer's style is compatible with your brand and that your values align.
  

The eCommerce industry depends on reviews and word of the mouth. Building trust with your customers and ensuring a seamless customer experience is a must for any company.

To be successful, companies also need to build trust with influencers.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Invest in long-term relationships instead of launching one-off collaborations.
  
• Leave room for creativity. Make sure that content creators can express their uniqueness.
• Communicate. Stay transparent and be clear about your goals and expectations.

The most common advice that you can hear is to come up with original and unique ideas. Although they can grab the attention of your potential customers, the work doesn't stop here. Campaigns require optimization.

For example, HypeFactory uses a three-flight approach. Campaigns are scaled gradually in three stages to find out what works best for a specific brand, in a specific region, and with a specific audience.

When running a campaign, make sure that you:

• constantly measure results and make changes when and if needed.
  
• experiment and adjust.
  
• use different analytics tools to see the full picture.
  

Sometimes it's not clear what you want or how to find the right fit. Analyzing social media profiles and followership is not as straightforward as it looks on paper. Besides, you might not always have time for negotiations or legal agreements. On top of that, management and optimization also require time and resources.

That's why many eCommerce businesses prefer to partner with agencies, especially full-service ones that can take care of the campaign from the very start to finish.

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